Scene 27¶
Notes26-01-14e¶
Scene 27¶
[26-01-14]
*Scene 27 - “Society Decides” (Celeste POV)
By the end of the day, the tea room always looked the same.
A scatter of mugs with lipstick arcs and tea stains. A plate with the polite wreckage of biscuits. A spoon abandoned in a saucer like someone had set it down to speak and never came back to finish the thought.
The light outside had gone honeyed, slanting in through the high windows and making the dust look deliberate — like we’d designed it. The sewing machines were silent. The irons were off. Even the dress forms seemed to relax, their pinned bodices holding their shape without being asked.
Mara had already left. You could tell by the absence of her quiet gravity — the way the room loosened a fraction when she wasn’t there to make you feel measured just by existing.
Lauren was still here, of course. Lauren stayed until the day was accounted for.
Sarah was perched on the edge of the bench with her ankle hooked under the rung, swinging her foot as if she had nowhere else to be in the world. Lucy had her arms folded, expression neutral in that way that meant she was paying attention. Talia leaned back in her chair, shoulders down, the posture of someone whose hands were finally allowed to stop.
And Charli — Charli sat where he always sat now, near the end of the table, not taking the best chair, not taking the centre. A mug in both hands. Eyes lowered, as if he’d been told that being seen too much was a kind of trespass.
He didn’t look tired in the way most men look tired.
He looked tired in the way women do after holding a day together: quiet, contained, still calculating what hadn’t been done yet.
Lauren slid the ledger toward herself with the same motion she used when she was about to close a file.
“All right,” she said. “We’re good.”
The words had weight, coming from her. She didn’t say them to comfort anyone. She said them when they were true.
Sarah tipped her mug toward Charli. “See? Your wife kept the world from falling over.”
Charli’s eyes flickered up, then down again, a reflex of embarrassment more than surprise. He smiled — small, unsure — like he didn’t know whether he was allowed to accept that kind of recognition.
Lucy didn’t correct Sarah. Neither did Talia. They simply let the word sit on the table with the mugs and the crumbs, as ordinary as everything else.
I watched Charli’s fingers tighten slightly around the mug.
Not offended.
Not delighted.
Just… absorbing.
Sarah’s grin sharpened. “You know what I like about it?” she said, as if continuing a thought we’d all been having privately. “No one had to teach her. She just… does it.”
Charli’s mouth opened, then closed again. He didn’t know what to do with the pronoun. With the title. With the room’s casual certainty.
Lauren’s gaze slid to me. Not accusatory. Just… expectant, in the way of a woman who has decided it is time you stopped pretending you hadn’t noticed what the rest of us had been living for weeks.
“What?” I said, because sometimes you have to invite the thing in.
Lauren didn’t blink. “We’re having the conversation.”
Talia exhaled a quiet laugh. “Thank God.”
Charli looked up properly then. Alarm sparked across his face — quick, boyish, the old instinct that a group of women being calm together meant something was about to become very real.
He glanced at me, as if I would explain. As if I would rescue him from whatever this was.
I didn’t.
I set my mug down with care. Not dramatic. Just deliberate.
“Charli,” I said.
The spelling was mine now. I didn’t even feel the switch happen anymore; it had already clicked into place, the way a key turns once you stop resisting the lock.
His eyes widened a fraction. Not at the sound — it was the same sound — but at my certainty.
Sarah’s foot stopped swinging.
Lauren’s posture didn’t change, but the room tightened subtly around the moment. Not aggression. Support. Reinforcement.
Lucy’s gaze held steady on Charli with something like: We’re not leaving you alone in this, but we’re also not letting you wriggle out of it.
I kept my voice calm.
“You’ve noticed,” I said, “that people make decisions about you.”
Charli swallowed. “They… talk.”
“That’s not what I said.”
He went still.
I leaned back slightly, giving him space while keeping the line of sight clean. You don’t crowd someone when you’re asking them to accept something. You don’t give them the excuse of feeling attacked.
“People decide,” I said. “They decide what you are to them. They decide what role you hold. They decide how they will treat you. And then they act accordingly.”
He looked down at his mug again, as if it might offer a different answer.
Sarah’s voice came softly, for once. “It’s true.”
Lucy added, matter-of-fact: “We’ve already been doing it.”
Talia nodded toward the ledger, sitting closed beside Lauren’s hand. “It’s written down.”
Charli’s throat worked. “But… I didn’t—”
“You didn’t ask for it,” I said. “I know.”
He looked up, almost pleading. “So why—”
“Because it’s happening,” I said. “And because you don’t get to opt out of reality by not naming it.”
There was a silence then — the kind that isn’t empty, just waiting.
Lauren tapped the ledger once with her finger. A small sound. A boundary.
“You didn’t notice the spelling?” she asked Charli. Not unkindly. Simply… confirming.
Charli’s cheeks flushed. “I— it’s… it’s the same.”
“It isn’t,” Sarah said, and took a bite of biscuit as if she were commenting on the weather. “Not to the room.”
Charli looked between us, lost. “But I’m still—”
“A member of this team,” Lucy said, clean and firm.
Talia’s mouth curved. “And you do the wife-work. That’s not an insult. That’s a promotion.”
Charli’s eyes darted to me again.
I let him look. I let him try to find a loophole in my face.
There wasn’t one.
“Listen to me,” I said. “Society will always decide something about us. You can spend your life arguing with strangers, correcting them, exhausting yourself—”
Sarah lifted her mug. “Been there.”
“—or you can decide,” I continued, “where you will belong. And what price you’re willing to pay for that belonging.”
Charli’s fingers clenched once around the mug, then loosened. He was breathing shallowly, the way someone does when they are trying not to feel.
He whispered, “Price.”
Lauren answered, crisp. “Language.”
Lucy added, as if it were obvious: “Consistency.”
Talia: “Not making us do emotional labour around it.”
Sarah’s grin flashed again, quick and bright. “And not sulking when we say it.”
Charli’s gaze dropped. His voice came small. “You… want me to… what.”
The old Charlie question. The one men ask when they want a woman to say it’s fine, you don’t have to.
I didn’t give him that.
I kept my voice even.
“I want you to understand,” I said, “that the room already treats you a certain way. You already move as one of us. You already do the work the way we do it. You already hold women’s boundaries like they matter.”
He flinched slightly at that — not because it was wrong, but because it was intimate.
“You can call that nothing,” I said. “You can pretend the words don’t matter. But the words are how the room keeps itself coherent.”
Lauren’s tone was almost gentle, which for her was a rare kind of mercy. “If you want to be here, you don’t get to be the one exception.”
Charli swallowed again. “And… the pronoun.”
Sarah tilted her head. “There she is. Finally.”
Charli’s face went scarlet.
Lucy didn’t smile. She just said, “We corrected someone today. Without thinking.”
Talia nodded. “Because it was obvious.”
The silence returned. Charli’s eyes went unfocused for a second, as if he were watching himself from a distance.
Then he said, hoarsely, “So you’re saying… it’s not mine.”
I shook my head once. “I’m saying parts of it aren’t. Society decides. Rooms decide. Cultures decide.”
“And… what do I decide?” he asked.
That — finally — was the right question.
I didn’t answer immediately. I let it sit, so he would feel the shape of it. Choice is heavier when you make someone hold it in their hands.
“You decide whether you fight this room,” I said quietly, “or you use it.”
Charli’s eyes flicked around the table. Sarah. Lucy. Talia. Lauren. All of them steady. All of them, in their different ways, refusing to let him turn this into a melodrama.
None of them looked cruel.
None of them looked uncertain.
They looked like women who had already made room for him — and were now asking him to stop standing in the doorway.
Charli’s voice came out thin. “If I say no…”
Lauren’s answer was immediate. “Then we stop carrying you.”
Not a threat. A fact.
Sarah softened it, because Sarah always liked to land the knife and then offer the bandage.
“And you don’t want that,” she said. “You’re too useful.”
Charli’s mouth twitched — a ghost of a smile that didn’t quite make it.
He stared into his mug as if it were a well. Then he whispered, “I want… to stay.”
I felt something in my chest shift — not pity, not triumph.
A calm recognition.
“Then you stay,” I said. “As what you already are in here.”
His throat bobbed.
He looked up.
And for the first time that day, he held my gaze instead of glancing away.
“Okay,” he said.
Just that. One word.
Not theatrical.
Not romantic.
The room didn’t applaud. It didn’t cheer. It simply accepted the answer like it had been waiting for it.
Lauren stood, sliding the ledger into her tote. “Good. Lock up.”
Sarah pushed back her chair with a satisfied scrape. “Your wife’s coming,” she said to me, and the words landed with a deliberate little emphasis — as we see it — and I let them land.
Lucy and Talia began gathering mugs and wiping the table down, the way women do when the day is over and work is still work.
Charli rose last. He moved automatically toward the sink, rinsing his mug, wiping it, setting it on the rack without being asked.
Wife-work.
Boring miracles.
I watched him for a beat too long.
Then I stood, too.
We filed out together — not as a parade, not as a spectacle — just as a team leaving a room that had decided what it was.
At the doorway, Sarah paused and looked back at me with that familiar crooked mouth.
“You know,” she said lightly, “a woman needs a wife.”
Lucy made a soft sound of agreement that wasn’t a laugh.
Talia nodded once, like it was obvious.
Lauren didn’t even turn around. “Of course,” she said, already walking.
I felt Charli’s attention on me like warmth.
And I heard myself say it — not defensively, not shyly, but as if I were stating a rule I’d always known and had simply stopped denying.
“Well,” I said, “a woman needs a wife.”
The women agreed.
And the corridor light caught the edge of Charli’s face as he followed us out, steady and silent, as if he’d been doing this for years.
As if he’d finally stopped waiting to be told he belonged.
Notes26-01-14ep1¶
Scene 27¶
Scene 27 (Blended) — “Stop Tiptoeing” (Sarah POV)
[26-01-14]
Scene 27 ✨ Stop Tiptoeing ✨ [Sarah]
Wardrobe has two moods: working and waiting.
Working is steam and noise and the room moving like a body that knows its own muscles—irons hissing, scissors biting, chalk tapping, someone calling for tape, someone else answering without looking up. Waiting is the same space, but hushed, as if the tables are holding their breath, as if the garments themselves are listening for their names.
Today it’s working.
The kettle clicks, someone swears at a stubborn bobbin, and Mara’s shears make that confident little snick that sounds like authority in metal form.
Charlie is already here.
Of course he is.
He turns up early the way anxious people do when they’ve learned that being first is safer than being seen arriving. Bag on the same hook. Hands washed thoroughly: palms, backs, between fingers, nails, as if cleanliness is a kind of apology he can offer the world in advance. He’s at the long table smoothing linen like it’s a nervous animal. He looks up when I come in, and his face does that automatic thing: polite, tentative, ready to make himself smaller if required.
The opposite of blokey. Blokes enter. They land in a room as if space was made for them by law. They take up oxygen and call it personality.
Charlie doesn’t take up anything. He asks the air for permission.
Lucy is in too, coffee in hand, unimpressed with the universe as usual. Tahlia follows, one earbud in, humming without meaning to, already tugging tape measures into submission. Mara says nothing to anyone, which is the closest she gets to a welcoming speech.
A couple of the Faire girls are due later for adjustments: hem lifts, sleeve easing, last-minute panic. The whole production is a tide pool of women at this point: skirts lifted, hair pinned, laughter breaking through steam like sunlight.
And Charlie is... in the middle of it, even when he’s not trying to be.
That’s the thing. It started before anyone changed a single word.
It started with how he behaves.
He doesn’t stare or crowd. He doesn’t do that typical male thing of testing boundaries by “accidentally” leaning too close and pretending it wasn’t on purpose. He asks before he touches fabric that isn’t his. He steps back when a woman shifts her weight. He reads the room like someone who’s spent his whole life learning that women’s comfort is a language, and he’s familiar with the dictionary.
He’s useful, too: quietly so, which is rarer than gold.
There’s a gown on the mannequin today, one of Mara’s prototypes. A beautiful beast of a thing: fitted bodice, clever seam placements, pins placed like punctuation. Charlie is meant to wear-test it briefly later, just movement checks. Stress points. Nothing dramatic.
He’s already flagged one weak point without being asked.
“Underarm seam,” he says softly, indicating the area with two fingers hovering, not touching. “If she reaches... it’ll pull.”
Lucy squints at it. “You’re sure?”
Charlie nods. “It’s... it’s already talking.”
Tahlia laughs. “Fabric doesn’t talk.”
Charlie’s mouth twitches, embarrassed. “Okay, not literally.”
Lucy, who has the emotional warmth of a refrigerator and the moral clarity of a knife, says, “It does if you’ve got eyes. Good catch.”
Charlie goes pink in the face, as if praise is a garment he doesn’t know how to wear.
That’s when I notice something I’ve noticed more and more lately:
The girls like him.
Not in a romantic way or a “he’s cute” way, but in the way women like a safe man in a women’s room: with relief. His humour is easy, not confronting. They like him with a kind of affection that isn’t flirtation, it’s fellowship.
He is, without trying to be, not a threat. Which is, in our world, a blooming miracle.
A Faire girl arrives early—Bree, I think her name is. Tall, strong shoulders, the sort who fills a doorway without making noise. She’s wearing leggings and a hoodie now, but I’ve seen her in full kit: stomacher pinned, skirt swinging, face lit like she was born to be looked at and never flinch. She waves her phone.
“Can someone save me? My sleeve is trying to strangle me.”
Mara doesn’t look up. “Tahlia.”
Tahlia gestures her over, but Bree’s eyes flick to Charlie.
“Oh,” she says, bright. “You’re him. The one who does the stress testing.”
Charlie stiffens at “him,” not offended: just... aware.
Tahlia answers first, distracted. “Yeah. He’s weirdly good.”
Lucy adds, deadpan, “He’s brutal.”
Charlie flinches, then realises Lucy means it as praise. His shoulders loosen a fraction.
Bree grins. “Love that for you, mate. Could you look at my sleeve seam? It’s doing a thing.”
Charlie looks momentarily alarmed, like she’s offered him a live snake, but he nods. He steps in carefully, hands hovering until Bree shifts her weight and says, “Go on then. Pin me.”
And he does, clinical as a nurse, gentle as a seamstress, eyes focused on the fabric and not her body in the way men’s eyes so often are. Bree watches his face in the mirror with theatrical curiosity.
“You’re not at all nervous, are you?”
Charlie hesitates. “A little.”
“Well, you’re not acting at all nervous,” she remarks.
Lucy snorts. “He’s always nervous. He just doesn’t make it our problem.”
And Bree says something then—light, offhand, not loaded—that tilts the day by a millimetre.
“That’s very "girl" of you,” she says with a friendly smile, looking up from Charlie’s careful hands to stare into his eyes. “Not making it our problem.”
Charlie’s looks back, his lip twitching. There’s a second where his face does that old reflex: Do I correct? Don’t let them misunderstand. Like misunderstanding is dangerous.
But he doesn’t say anything. He swallows, and give her a weak smile. His eyes drop back to the seam.
Bree doesn’t push. Theatre women are good at reading the moment and not punching through it. She just hums and lets him work. When she leaves, sleeve saved, she tosses over her shoulder,
“Tell your girls you’re a wizard.”
Lucy calls back, “He’s not a wizard, he’s a nervous Nellie!”
Tahlia laughs, and Charlie—Charlie laughs too. Quietly, almost like it escaped. It is such a small sound, and it changes the air.
By midday the Faire girls have started drifting through in twos and threes, and Wardrobe feels less like a workplace and more like a women’s camp: fabrics on every surface, hair pins shared, snacks appearing without anyone admitting they brought them, bodies moving around each other without apology.
Charlie is included in the small things first.
Tahlia offers him a hair tie when his fringe keeps falling into his eyes. Lucy slides a spare thimble across the table when his fingers are raw from hand-stitching. Someone pushes lip balm toward him with a muttered, “You look dry,” as if that’s a crime.
He accepts it all very politely... too politely. Like a starving person taking bread and trying not to look hungry. He still apologises too much. Still asks permission for space that’s already been given. But he’s less rigid, less braced.
He speaks a fraction more.
He joins the conversation sometimes, tentative at first—an observational comment, a small joke—then with slightly more ease when he realises no one is going to punish him for having a voice.
It’s in the middle of this easy chatter that the language begins to shift.
Not with a trumpet or a meeting, but with girls being girls, and saying what they mean.
Tahlia is telling a story about a client who called stays “a corset thingy,” and Mara’s eyes nearly set fire to the table. Lucy is relaying it with her usual scorn—“They think understructure is optional because they’ve never had to hold anything up”—and one of the Faire girls, a petite brunette with a laugh like broken glass, points at Charlie and says:
“He gets it, though. Look at him. He’s got the patience of a woman.”
Charlie startles. Again—again—his face rises into correction, then stops.
Because what would he even say?
No, I don’t? while his hands are literally doing the care-work of a seam? Lucy, without looking up, says,
“He’s got the fear of a woman. That’s why. He knows if he screws it up, Mara will kill him.”
Mara doesn’t blink. “Correct.”
Everyone laughs.
Charlie laughs too, but his laugh is smaller. Not because he’s fragile, because he’s listening. Because he’s taking in something he’s never had before: women laughing with him, not at him, and no one sharpening a sexual edge into it.
And then—almost invisibly—someone says it. Not about him. Not to him.
Just... in the air.
Bree returns with another girl, and she says, “She’s the one who fixed my sleeve,” gesturing in Charlie’s direction, and then she keeps walking as if the word is nothing. As if it’s already true.
I freeze in the tiniest way. Not shocked or scandalised: just registering the move.
Lucy’s head lifts. Tahlia’s eyes flick to Charlie, quick as a pulse check. Charlie goes still.
And for a beat, I think he’ll correct it... he’ll panic, he’ll retreat into “no, no, that’s not—” because that’s what he’s trained to do. Keep everyone comfortable by making himself smaller.
But he doesn’t.
He takes a breath. His fingers tighten around the linen, then ease.
And he says nothing.
The moment passes, not awkwardly, but smoothly, because women are experts at letting a door open without slamming it.
Tahlia, bless her, doesn’t make it a Big Thing. She doesn’t ask a question like it’s a quiz. She just accepts the shape of the room.
“She did fix it,” Tahlia says lightly, as if she’s confirming the weather. “She spotted the weak point before anyone else.”
Lucy huffs, as if irritated by the whole universe. “She’s annoyingly observant.”
Charlie looks up, eyes wide. He’s watching them the way you watch someone handling a fragile object—terrified they’ll drop it. Tahlia, with a gentle smile to dilute the impact, meets his gaze briefly, just long enough for him to understand something:
We’re not dropping this. We're not dropping you.
And then she turns away and keeps working, because that’s how you make kindness stick: you don't make it a big thing. You treat it like it’s normal.
Later, when a delivery bloke knocks at the side door, the room tightens by habit. Different knock. Man’s knock. The kind that assumes the world will part.
He comes in smelling of diesel and entitlement, clipboard under his arm, eyes scanning the room like he’s shopping. He glances at Charlie—at Charlie’s smallness, his quietness, his softness—and his expression does that unpleasant male calculus. Categorising. Deciding.
He points his pen vaguely. “Where d’you want this, mate? He—”
He doesn’t get to finish.
“She wants it left by the back wall,” I say, bright as a bell. “And you’ll mind your hands. Those boxes aren’t the only thing fragile in here.”
The bloke blinks, recalibrates. He mutters something that could be an apology if he weren’t allergic to the concept, and he shifts the boxes where I indicate, suddenly very interested in being helpful.
The door closes behind him.
The room exhales.
Charlie hasn’t moved, but something in him has. His shoulders loosen. The line of his jaw softens. Like someone’s removed a weight he didn’t realise he was carrying. Lucy takes a sip of coffee and says, matter-of-fact:
“Good.”
Tahlia, without looking up, adds, “We can stop tiptoeing now.”
And I—because I’m me, and because naming things is half my job in this building—lean against the table and say, “About time.”
Charlie’s eyes flick to me. Cautious.
“Are you—” he starts, then stops, because he doesn’t know what he’s allowed to ask for.
I keep it easy. Teasing, but not sharp. A door offered as air.
“If it doesn’t feel right,” I say, “you can tell us. We’re not savages.”
Lucy snorts. “Speak for yourself.”
Charlie swallows. He looks at the women around him: Lucy’s brutal competence, Tahlia’s effortless camaraderie, the Faire girls’ theatrical warmth. He looks at me, and I know what he’s seeing: someone who will cut a man down for overstepping without turning it into a melodrama.
He says, very softly, “I... don’t mind.”
Not “I want.” Not “I demand.” Not “This is my identity.”
Just: I don’t mind.
It is the most Charlie thing in the world: making relief sound like it’s no trouble. Lucy watchesCharlie for a beat, then says, flat and final,
“Good. I’m not doing mental gymnastics every time I talk about you, love.”
Tahlia smiles. “She’s literally here. She’s literally doing the work.”
One of the Faire girls, the brunette with the glass-laugh, grins and says, “She’s one of us, then.”
She goes pink in the face. And I see it: the way the word lands, as a hand on the shoulder. A tag of belonging.
From then on, it spreads. Not because anyone enforces it, but bBecause it’s easier. It fits. And because women like language that keeps the room safe.
“She needs the smaller pins.” “Tell her I’ve got the tape.” “She found the weak point again.”
Charli starts moving differently. Not instantly or like she's pulled on a costume, but like someone who’s stopped bracing for a blow. She joins us for lunch without hovering at the edges. She laughs a little more, a little easier. She smiles more. She even responds with opinions if asked: small ones at first, then slightly more when she realises no one is going to punish her for being present.
And all instinct to correct us entirely disappears.
As if correcting would risk the gift. Our gift.
As if “she” is a warm coat she’s afraid might be taken back if she denies liking it.
One afternoon, near the end of shift, I catch a look on her face that doesn’t match the room. Everyone else is buzzing: Faire girls chattering about tomorrow’s rehearsal, Lucy complaining about pockets, Tahlia humming while she cleans her machine. The air is light.
Charli is light too—until she turns her head toward the window and the overhead lamp catches her profile.
There’s a flicker. A shadow, brief as a stitch snag.
A secret sorrow.
It’s in her eyes, and it makes no sense with the laughter around her. The sort of sadness you see when someone has something precious in their hands and suddenly remembers the world is full of thieves.
Lucy sees it too. Lucy sees everything, she just doesn’t always bother to comment.
“You all right, love?”
The word love isn’t Lucy’s usual. Which means she means it.
Charli blinks, startled, and the sorrow snaps back behind her face like a curtain drawn.
“Yeah,” she says quickly. “I’m fine.”
She is not fine. But she is safe enough now to pretend she is, and that, frankly, is its own kind of progress.
Tahlia bumps her shoulder lightly as she passes. “Come tomorrow,” she says. “We’re getting chips. You’re not allowed to say no. You’ll just make it weird.”
The Faire girls chorus agreement. Bree points a finger at Charli like she’s casting a spell.
“She’s coming,” Bree declares. “She’s ours.”
Charli’s breath catches.
And there it is, plain as anything:
Not he, performing near women.
But she, held by women.
She looks down at her hands for a moment—at the little pinpricks, the chalk smudges, the evidence of belonging. Then she lifts her eyes back to the room, and her smile is small but unmistakably real.
“I’ll come,” she says.
Mara taps the table once, impatient with sentiment.
“Enough talking,” she says. “More work.”
And that’s Wardrobe, isn’t it? Just women doing the quiet, effective thing.
Turning “she” from a word into a place.
Notes26-01-21e¶
Scene 27¶
Scene 27 — “Stop Tiptoeing” (Sarah POV)
Wardrobe has a smell when it’s running properly.
Steam, starch, hot iron, a faint mineral tang from pins warmed and cooled and warmed again. Add to that the girls’ shampoo—whatever scent they’ve thrown at the day to make it behave—and the whole place becomes a kind of working perfume. Not pretty. Not delicate. Functional. Like antiseptic. Like certainty.
I arrive to the usual morning rhythm: kettle click, someone swearing softly at a stubborn bobbin, Mara’s scissors making that confident little snick that sounds like authority in metal form.
Charli’s already there, of course.
She has this thing—turning up early as if the building might judge her if she’s late. Hooking her bag on the same hook. Washing her hands like she’s in a theatre. Palms, backs, between fingers, nails. Thorough. Quiet. A girl could set her watch by it.
It’s the opposite of blokey. Blokes arrive. They land in a room. They take up oxygen and call it personality.
Charli arrives the way someone enters a chapel: careful not to bump the furniture with her soul.
She’s at the long table, smoothing a length of linen like it’s a nervous animal. The fabric makes a faint whisper under her palms. She’s wearing the apron—the proper one, not the “I’m trying it on as a joke” one. Hair pinned back. No fuss. No bravado. Just… present.
Lucy’s in, too, with her coffee and her permanently unimpressed expression, which I’ve come to see as a love language. Tahlia follows, one earbud in, humming without meaning to, already tugging tape measures into submission.
Mara says nothing to anyone, which is, in Mara terms, a warm hug.
I dump my bag, shrug out of my jacket, and take stock the way I always do: who’s raw, who’s brittle, who’s holding steady, who’s about to crack and pretend it’s fine.
Charli looks… almost settled.
Not confident. I’m not mad. But less like she’s bracing for impact.
There’s a knock at the side door. Not one of ours. Different knock. A man’s knock. The kind that assumes you’ll open because he’s announced himself to the universe.
Tahlia and Lucy both glance up at the same time.
Here we go.
I move without thinking, not because I’m heroic—God forbid—but because I have the fastest mouth and I’m allergic to men taking liberties in women’s rooms.
The door swings open. Delivery bloke. High-vis vest. Clipboard. The smell of diesel and entitlement.
He looks past me immediately, scanning the room like he’s shopping. His eyes flick to Charli and linger a fraction too long. Not leering, exactly. Just… deciding. Categorising. That unpleasant little internal survey blokes do as if women are a form they’re trying to fill out.
“Morning, love,” he says to me, then points his pen vaguely toward Charli. “Where d’you want this, mate? He—”
He doesn’t even finish. He’s already decided.
I smile. Not kind. Not cruel. The exact expression I reserve for men who think they own the language.
“She wants it left by the back wall,” I say, clear as a bell. “And you’ll mind your hands. Those boxes aren’t the only thing fragile in here.”
There’s a tiny pause.
The man blinks, recalibrates, and does what most men do when confronted with certainty: he pretends he misheard and follows instructions. He shifts the boxes where I indicate, mumbling something that could be an apology if he weren’t allergic to the concept.
Behind me I feel the room go still—not tense, just… aligned.
Lucy doesn’t even lift her brows. Tahlia’s face stays neutral. Mara snips fabric like nothing happened, which, again, is Mara endorsing something by refusing to dignify it with comment.
Charli hasn’t moved. But I see it: the smallest change in her shoulders. A loosen. A letting-go.
The delivery bloke scuttles out. The door closes.
And still no one says anything.
Because women don’t have to announce their solidarity. We just do it. Quietly. Like putting a hot drink into someone’s hands without asking if they want it.
I turn and catch Charli looking at me, eyes wide in that way that’s half startled and half… relieved. As if she’s trying not to make it a big deal, because big deals are dangerous.
“You all right?” I ask, casual. I don’t make a performance of it. I’m not Celeste. I don’t do “tender speeches.” I do practical kindness with sharp edges.
Charli’s lips part like she’s about to correct me—about to correct the whole world—and then she doesn’t.
She swallows.
“Yeah,” she says. Small. Honest. “Yeah.”
Lucy takes a sip of coffee and says, as if she’s commenting on the weather, “Good. Because she’s got stays to try on and I don’t want any sulking near my seams.”
It’s delivered with Lucy’s usual contempt for sentiment. But it lands.
Tahlia snorts, half-laughing. “She won’t sulk. She’ll apologise to the fabric if it wrinkles.”
Charli’s face goes pink. Not angry-pink. Not offended. Just… seen.
And still she doesn’t correct them.
That’s the moment, I realise.
Not my little doorstep boundary trick. That was just the spark. The moment is her. The way she lets it sit. The way she doesn’t swat it away.
We’ve all been tiptoeing around it for weeks—around the invisible tripwire of pronouns, the social minefield of “what do you call someone when the world insists on categories and she’s in the middle of the river?”
But tiptoeing has its own cruelty. It makes a person feel like a problem you’re trying not to step on.
I lean against the worktable and let my voice go light. Teasing, but not mean. The tone you use when you’re offering a door and pretending it’s just air.
“So,” I say, “are we done tiptoeing, then?”
Lucy’s mouth quirks. “About time.”
Tahlia glances at Charli. Doesn’t ask permission like she’s petitioning a council. Just checks, like you check someone’s temperature with the back of your hand.
Charli breathes in. Her fingers tighten on the linen. Then ease.
“I… don’t mind,” she says.
Not “I want.” Not “I demand.” Not “I’m claiming.”
Just: I don’t mind.
It’s the most Charli thing in the world—making her own relief sound like it’s no trouble.
And somehow that makes something in my chest soften, because I recognise it. That lifelong habit of being grateful for the bare minimum of acceptance.
Lucy watches her for a beat, then says, flat and final, “Good. Because I’m not doing mental gymnastics every time I talk about you. It’s exhausting.”
Tahlia laughs. “Right? She’s literally here. She’s literally doing the work. That’s… that’s the point.”
Mara cuts through the moment by tapping the table once, impatient with anything that smells like a scene.
“Less talking,” she says. “More pinning.”
And that’s that.
No speech. No policy. No ceremony.
Just a room of women who’ve quietly decided a thing is true, and the language catches up like it’s been waiting.
Later, when one of the Faire girls—Annie’s lot, all curls and confidence and “darling” this and “sweetheart” that—comes in for a hem adjustment, she glances at Charli and asks, “Is she the one who does the stress testing?”
Lucy answers without looking up. “Yeah. She’s brutal.”
Charli flinches at “brutal,” then realises Lucy means it as praise. She gives the smallest smile.
And she doesn’t correct a single word.
By midday it’s simply… normal.
“She needs the smaller pins.” “Tell her I’ve got the tape.” “She found the weak point again.”
We say it the way we say “iron’s hot” or “that seam won’t hold.” A practical truth. A thing in the air.
Charli starts moving differently. Not instantly. Not like a costume. But like someone who’s stopped bracing for a blow.
She speaks a fraction more. Laughs once, quietly, when Tahlia tells a story about a client who called stays “a corset thingy” and Mara’s eyes nearly set fire to the table.
I catch Charli watching us sometimes—watching Lucy’s unimpressed competence, Tahlia’s effortless camaraderie, my own mouth doing what it does—and it’s like she’s learning a language she always wanted to speak but didn’t think she was allowed.
And the cruelest part?
I think she believes she’s earning it by being softer.
As if friendship is a reward for compliance.
No, love.
Friendship is what happens when women decide you’re safe with them.
And we have.
Notes26-01-21e1¶
Emily ReWrite¶
[26-01-21]
Scene 27 — “Stop Tiptoeing” (Sarah POV)
Wardrobe has a smell when it’s running properly.
Steam, starch, hot iron, a faint mineral tang from pins warmed and cooled and warmed again. Add to that the girls’ shampoo—whatever scent they’ve thrown at the day to make it behave—and the whole place becomes a kind of working perfume. Not pretty. Not delicate. Functional. Like antiseptic. Like certainty.
I arrive to the usual morning rhythm: kettle click, someone swearing softly at a stubborn bobbin, Mara’s scissors making that confident little snick that sounds like authority in metal form.
Charli’s already there, of course.
She has this thing—turning up early as if the building might judge her if she’s late. Hooking her bag on the same hook. Washing her hands like she’s in a theatre. Palms, backs, between fingers, nails. Thorough. Quiet. A girl could set her watch by it.
It’s the opposite of blokey. Blokes arrive. They land in a room. They take up oxygen and call it personality.
Charli arrives the way someone enters a chapel: careful not to bump the furniture with her soul.
She’s at the long table, smoothing a length of linen like it’s a nervous animal. The fabric makes a faint whisper under her palms. She’s wearing the apron—the proper one, not the “I’m trying it on as a joke” one. Hair pinned back. No fuss. No bravado. Just… present.
Lucy’s in, too, with her coffee and her permanently unimpressed expression, which I’ve come to see as a love language. Tahlia follows, one earbud in, humming without meaning to, already tugging tape measures into submission.
Mara says nothing to anyone, which is, in Mara terms, a warm hug.
I dump my bag, shrug out of my jacket, and take stock the way I always do: who’s raw, who’s brittle, who’s holding steady, who’s about to crack and pretend it’s fine.
Charli looks… almost settled.
Not confident. I’m not mad. But less like she’s bracing for impact.
There’s a knock at the side door. Not one of ours. Different knock. A man’s knock. The kind that assumes you’ll open because he’s announced himself to the universe.
Tahlia and Lucy both glance up at the same time.
Here we go.
I move without thinking, not because I’m heroic—God forbid—but because I have the fastest mouth and I’m allergic to men taking liberties in women’s rooms.
The door swings open. Delivery bloke. High-vis vest. Clipboard. The smell of diesel and entitlement.
He looks past me immediately, scanning the room like he’s shopping. His eyes flick to Charli and linger a fraction too long. Not leering, exactly. Just… deciding. Categorising. That unpleasant little internal survey blokes do as if women are a form they’re trying to fill out.
“Morning, love,” he says to me, then points his pen vaguely toward Charli. “Where d’you want this, mate? He—”
He doesn’t even finish. He’s already decided.
I smile. Not kind. Not cruel. The exact expression I reserve for men who think they own the language.
“She wants it left by the back wall,” I say, clear as a bell. “And you’ll mind your hands. Those boxes aren’t the only thing fragile in here.”
There’s a tiny pause.
The man blinks, recalibrates, and does what most men do when confronted with certainty: he pretends he misheard and follows instructions. He shifts the boxes where I indicate, mumbling something that could be an apology if he weren’t allergic to the concept.
Behind me I feel the room go still—not tense, just… aligned.
Lucy doesn’t even lift her brows. Tahlia’s face stays neutral. Mara snips fabric like nothing happened, which, again, is Mara endorsing something by refusing to dignify it with comment.
Charli hasn’t moved. But I see it: the smallest change in her shoulders. A loosen. A letting-go.
The delivery bloke scuttles out. The door closes.
And still no one says anything.
Because women don’t have to announce their solidarity. We just do it. Quietly. Like putting a hot drink into someone’s hands without asking if they want it.
I turn and catch Charli looking at me, eyes wide in that way that’s half startled and half… relieved. As if she’s trying not to make it a big deal, because big deals are dangerous.
“You all right?” I ask, casual. I don’t make a performance of it. I’m not Celeste. I don’t do “tender speeches.” I do practical kindness with sharp edges.
Charli’s lips part like she’s about to correct me—about to correct the whole world—and then she doesn’t.
She swallows.
“Yeah,” she says. Small. Honest. “Yeah.”
Lucy takes a sip of coffee and says, as if she’s commenting on the weather, “Good. Because she’s got stays to try on and I don’t want any sulking near my seams.”
It’s delivered with Lucy’s usual contempt for sentiment. But it lands.
Tahlia snorts, half-laughing. “She won’t sulk. She’ll apologise to the fabric if it wrinkles.”
Charli’s face goes pink. Not angry-pink. Not offended. Just… seen.
And still she doesn’t correct them.
That’s the moment, I realise.
Not my little doorstep boundary trick. That was just the spark. The moment is her. The way she lets it sit. The way she doesn’t swat it away.
We’ve all been tiptoeing around it for weeks—around the invisible tripwire of pronouns, the social minefield of “what do you call someone when the world insists on categories and she’s in the middle of the river?”
But tiptoeing has its own cruelty. It makes a person feel like a problem you’re trying not to step on.
I lean against the worktable and let my voice go light. Teasing, but not mean. The tone you use when you’re offering a door and pretending it’s just air.
“So,” I say, “are we done tiptoeing, then?”
Lucy’s mouth quirks. “About time.”
Tahlia glances at Charli. Doesn’t ask permission like she’s petitioning a council. Just checks, like you check someone’s temperature with the back of your hand.
Charli breathes in. Her fingers tighten on the linen. Then ease.
“I… don’t mind,” she says.
Not “I want.” Not “I demand.” Not “I’m claiming.”
Just: I don’t mind.
It’s the most Charli thing in the world—making her own relief sound like it’s no trouble.
And somehow that makes something in my chest soften, because I recognise it. That lifelong habit of being grateful for the bare minimum of acceptance.
Lucy watches her for a beat, then says, flat and final, “Good. Because I’m not doing mental gymnastics every time I talk about you. It’s exhausting.”
Tahlia laughs. “Right? She’s literally here. She’s literally doing the work. That’s… that’s the point.”
Mara cuts through the moment by tapping the table once, impatient with anything that smells like a scene.
“Less talking,” she says. “More pinning.”
And that’s that.
No speech. No policy. No ceremony.
Just a room of women who’ve quietly decided a thing is true, and the language catches up like it’s been waiting.
Later, when one of the Faire girls—Annie’s lot, all curls and confidence and “darling” this and “sweetheart” that—comes in for a hem adjustment, she glances at Charli and asks, “Is she the one who does the stress testing?”
Lucy answers without looking up. “Yeah. She’s brutal.”
Charli flinches at “brutal,” then realises Lucy means it as praise. She gives the smallest smile.
And she doesn’t correct a single word.
By midday it’s simply… normal.
“She needs the smaller pins.” “Tell her I’ve got the tape.” “She found the weak point again.”
We say it the way we say “iron’s hot” or “that seam won’t hold.” A practical truth. A thing in the air.
Charli starts moving differently. Not instantly. Not like a costume. But like someone who’s stopped bracing for a blow.
She speaks a fraction more. Laughs once, quietly, when Tahlia tells a story about a client who called stays “a corset thingy” and Mara’s eyes nearly set fire to the table.
I catch Charli watching us sometimes—watching Lucy’s unimpressed competence, Tahlia’s effortless camaraderie, my own mouth doing what it does—and it’s like she’s learning a language she always wanted to speak but didn’t think she was allowed.
And the cruelest part?
I think she believes she’s earning it by being softer.
As if friendship is a reward for compliance.
No, love.
Friendship is what happens when women decide you’re safe with them.
And we have.
Notes26-01-21e2¶
Emily ReWrite¶
[26-01-21]
Scene 27 (Blended) — “Stop Tiptoeing” (Sarah POV)
Wardrobe has two moods: working and waiting.
Working is steam and noise and the room moving like a body that knows its own muscles—irons hissing, scissors biting, chalk tapping, someone calling for tape, someone else answering without looking up. Waiting is the same space, but hushed, as if the tables are holding their breath, as if the garments themselves are listening for their names.
Today it’s working.
The kettle clicks, someone swears at a stubborn bobbin, and Mara’s shears make that confident little snick that sounds like authority in metal form.
Charlie is already here.
Of course he is.
He turns up early the way anxious people do when they’ve learned that being first is safer than being seen arriving. Bag on the same hook. Hands washed thoroughly—palms, backs, between fingers, nails—as if cleanliness is a kind of apology he can offer the world in advance. He’s at the long table smoothing linen like it’s a nervous animal.
He looks up when I come in, and his face does that automatic thing: polite, tentative, ready to make himself smaller if required.
The opposite of blokey.
Blokes enter. They land in a room as if space was made for them by law. They take up oxygen and call it personality.
Charlie doesn’t take up anything. He asks the air for permission.
Lucy is in too, coffee in hand, unimpressed with the universe as usual. Tahlia follows, one earbud in, humming without meaning to, already tugging tape measures into submission. Mara says nothing to anyone, which is the closest she gets to a welcoming speech.
A couple of the Faire girls are due later for adjustments—hem lifts, sleeve easing, last-minute panic. The whole production is a tide pool of women at this point: skirts lifted, hair pinned, laughter breaking through steam like sunlight.
And Charlie is… in the middle of it, even when he’s not trying to be.
That’s the thing. It started before anyone changed a single word.
It started with how he behaves.
He doesn’t stare. Doesn’t crowd. Doesn’t do that male thing of testing boundaries by “accidentally” leaning too close and pretending it wasn’t on purpose. He asks before he touches fabric that isn’t his. He steps back when a woman shifts her weight. He reads the room like someone who’s spent his whole life learning that women’s comfort is a language, and he’s finally found the dictionary.
He’s useful, too. Quietly so, which is rarer than gold.
There’s a gown on the mannequin today—one of Mara’s prototypes. A beautiful beast of a thing: fitted bodice, clever seam placements, pins placed like punctuation. Charlie is meant to wear-test it briefly later, just movement checks. Stress points. Nothing dramatic.
He’s already flagged one weak point without being asked.
“Underarm seam,” he says softly, indicating the area with two fingers hovering, not touching. “If she reaches… it’ll pull.”
Lucy squints at it. “You’re sure?”
Charlie nods. “It’s… it’s already talking.”
Tahlia laughs. “Fabric doesn’t talk.”
Charlie’s mouth twitches, embarrassed. “Not literally.”
Lucy, who has the emotional warmth of a refrigerator and the moral clarity of a knife, says, “It does if you’ve got eyes. Good catch.”
Charlie goes pink in the face, as if praise is a garment he doesn’t know how to wear.
That’s when I notice something I’ve noticed more and more lately:
The girls like him.
Not in a romantic way. Not in a “he’s cute” way. In the way women like a safe man in a women’s room: with relief. With easy humour. With a kind of affection that isn’t flirtation, it’s fellowship.
He is, without trying to be, not a threat.
Which is, in our world, a blooming miracle.
A Faire girl arrives early—Bree, I think her name is. Tall, strong shoulders, the sort who fills a doorway without making noise. She’s wearing leggings and a hoodie now, but I’ve seen her in full kit: stomacher pinned, skirt swinging, face lit like she was born to be looked at and never flinch.
She waves her phone. “Can someone save me? My sleeve is trying to strangle me.”
Mara doesn’t look up. “Tahlia.”
Tahlia gestures her over, but Bree’s eyes flick to Charlie.
“Oh,” she says, bright. “You’re him. The one who does the stress testing.”
Charlie stiffens at “him,” not offended—just… aware.
Tahlia answers first, distracted. “Yeah. He’s weirdly good.”
Lucy adds, deadpan, “He’s brutal.”
Charlie flinches, then realises Lucy means it as praise. His shoulders loosen a fraction.
Bree grins. “Love that for you, mate. Could you look at my sleeve seam? It’s doing a thing.”
Charlie looks momentarily alarmed—like she’s offered him a live snake—but he nods and steps in carefully, hands hovering until Bree shifts her weight and says, “Go on then. Pin me.”
And he does, clinical as a nurse, gentle as a seamstress, eyes focused on the fabric and not her body in the way men’s eyes so often are.
Bree watches his face in the mirror with theatrical curiosity. “You’re not nervous,” she says.
Charlie hesitates. “I am.”
“You’re not acting nervous,” she corrects.
Lucy snorts. “He’s always nervous. He just doesn’t make it our problem.”
And Bree says something then—light, offhand, not loaded—that tilts the day by a millimetre.
“That’s very girl of you,” she says, smiling at Charlie’s careful hands. “Not making it our problem.”
Charlie’s head jerks up.
There’s a second where his face does that old reflex: Correct. Clarify. Don’t let them misunderstand. Like misunderstanding is dangerous.
But he doesn’t say anything. He swallows. His eyes drop back to the seam.
And Bree doesn’t push. Theatre women are good at reading the moment and not punching through it. She just hums and lets him work.
When she leaves, sleeve saved, she tosses over her shoulder, “Tell your girls you’re a wizard,” and Lucy calls back, “He’s not a wizard, he’s a nervous wreck,” and Tahlia laughs, and Charlie—Charlie laughs too.
Quietly. Like it escaped.
It is such a small sound, and it changes the air.
By midday the Faire girls have started drifting through in twos and threes, and Wardrobe feels less like a workplace and more like a women’s camp: fabrics on every surface, hair pins shared, snacks appearing without anyone admitting they brought them, bodies moving around each other without apology.
Charlie is included in the small things first.
Tahlia offers him a hair tie when his fringe keeps falling into his eyes. Lucy slides a spare thimble across the table when his fingers are raw from hand-stitching. Someone pushes lip balm toward him with a muttered, “You look dry,” as if that’s a crime.
He accepts it all too politely. Like a starving person taking bread and trying not to look hungry.
He still apologises too much. Still asks permission for space that’s already been given.
But he’s less rigid. Less braced.
He speaks a fraction more.
He joins the conversation sometimes, tentative at first—an observational comment, a small joke—then with slightly more ease when he realises no one is going to punish him for having a voice.
It’s in the middle of this easy chatter that the language begins to shift.
Not with a trumpet. Not with a meeting.
With girls being girls, and meaning what they mean.
Tahlia is telling a story about a client who called stays “a corset thingy,” and Mara’s eyes nearly set fire to the table. Lucy is relaying it with her usual scorn—“They think understructure is optional because they’ve never had to hold anything up”—and one of the Faire girls, a petite brunette with a laugh like broken glass, points at Charlie and says:
“He gets it, though. Look at him. He’s got the patience of a woman.”
Charlie startles.
Again—again—his face rises into correction, then stops.
Because what would he even say?
No, I don’t? while his hands are literally doing the care-work of a seam?
Lucy, without looking up, says, “He’s got the fear of a woman. That’s why. He knows if he screws it up, Mara will kill him.”
Mara doesn’t blink. “Correct.”
Everyone laughs.
Charlie laughs too, but his laugh is smaller. Not because he’s fragile. Because he’s listening. Because he’s taking in something he’s never had before: women laughing with him, not at him, and no one sharpening a sexual edge into it.
And then—almost invisibly—someone says it.
Not about him. Not to him.
Just… in the air.
Bree returns with another girl, and she says, “She’s the one who fixed my sleeve,” gesturing in Charlie’s direction, and then she keeps walking as if the word is nothing. As if it’s already true.
I freeze in the tiniest way. Not shocked. Not scandalised.
Just registering the move.
Lucy’s head lifts. Tahlia’s eyes flick to Charlie, quick as a pulse check.
Charlie goes still.
And for a beat, I think he’ll correct it—think he’ll panic, think he’ll retreat into “no, no, that’s not—” because that’s what he’s trained to do: keep everyone comfortable by making himself smaller.
But he doesn’t.
He takes a breath.
His fingers tighten around the linen, then ease.
And he says nothing.
The moment passes, not awkwardly, but smoothly, because women are experts at letting a door open without slamming it.
Tahlia, bless her, doesn’t make it a Big Thing. She doesn’t ask a question like it’s a quiz. She just accepts the shape of the room.
“She did fix it,” Tahlia says lightly, as if she’s confirming the weather. “She spotted the weak point before anyone else.”
Lucy huffs, as if irritated by the whole universe. “She’s annoyingly observant.”
Charlie looks up, eyes wide. He’s watching them the way you watch someone handling a fragile object—terrified they’ll drop it.
Tahlia meets his gaze briefly, just long enough for him to understand one thing:
We’re not dropping it.
And then she turns away and keeps working, because that’s how you make kindness stick: you treat it like it’s normal.
Later, when a delivery bloke knocks at the side door, the room tightens by habit.
Different knock. Man’s knock. The kind that assumes the world will part.
He comes in smelling of diesel and entitlement, clipboard under his arm, eyes scanning the room like he’s shopping. He glances at Charlie—at Charlie’s smallness, his quietness, his softness—and his expression does that unpleasant male calculus. Categorising. Deciding.
He points his pen vaguely. “Where d’you want this, mate? He—”
He doesn’t get to finish.
“She wants it left by the back wall,” I say, bright as a bell. “And you’ll mind your hands. Those boxes aren’t the only thing fragile in here.”
The bloke blinks, recalibrates. He mutters something that could be an apology if he weren’t allergic to the concept, and he shifts the boxes where I indicate, suddenly very interested in being helpful.
The door closes behind him.
The room exhales.
Charlie hasn’t moved, but something in him has.
His shoulders loosen. The line of his jaw softens. Like someone’s removed a weight he didn’t realise he was carrying.
Lucy takes a sip of coffee and says, matter-of-fact, “Good.”
Tahlia, without looking up, adds, “We can stop tiptoeing now.”
And I—because I’m me, and because naming things is half my job in this building—lean against the table and say, “Thank Christ.”
Charlie’s eyes flick to me. Cautious.
“Are you—” he starts, then stops, because he doesn’t know what he’s allowed to ask for.
I keep it easy. Teasing, but not sharp. A door offered as air.
“If it doesn’t feel right,” I say, “you can tell us. We’re not savages.”
Lucy snorts. “Speak for yourself.”
Charlie swallows. He looks at the women around him: Lucy’s brutal competence, Tahlia’s effortless camaraderie, the Faire girls’ theatrical warmth. He looks at me, and I know what he’s seeing: someone who will cut a man down for overstepping without turning it into a melodrama.
He says, very softly, “I… don’t mind.”
Not “I want.” Not “I demand.” Not “This is my identity.”
Just: I don’t mind.
It is the most Charlie thing in the world—making relief sound like it’s no trouble.
Lucy watches him for a beat, then says, flat and final, “Good. I’m not doing mental gymnastics every time I talk about you.”
Tahlia smiles. “She’s literally here. She’s literally doing the work.”
One of the Faire girls, the brunette with the glass-laugh, grins and says, “She’s one of us, then.”
Charlie—Charli—goes pink in the face.
And I see it: the way the word lands not as a judgement, but as a hand on the shoulder.
A tag of belonging.
From then on, it spreads.
Not because anyone enforces it. Because it’s easier. Because it fits. Because women like language that keeps the room safe.
“She needs the smaller pins.” “Tell her I’ve got the tape.” “She found the weak point again.”
Charli starts moving differently. Not instantly. Not like a costume. Like someone who’s stopped bracing for a blow.
She joins us for lunch without hovering at the edges. She laughs a little more. She offers opinions—small ones at first, then slightly more when she realises no one is going to punish her for being present.
And she stops correcting us entirely.
As if correcting would risk the gift.
As if “she” is a warm coat she’s afraid might be taken back if she admits she likes it.
One afternoon, near the end of shift, I catch a look on her face that doesn’t match the room.
Everyone else is buzzing—Faire girls chattering about tomorrow’s rehearsal, Lucy complaining about pockets, Tahlia humming while she cleans her machine. The air is light.
Charli is light too—until she turns her head toward the window and the overhead lamp catches her profile.
There’s a flicker.
A shadow, brief as a stitch snag.
A secret sorrow.
It’s in her eyes, and it makes no sense with the laughter around her. The sort of sadness you see when someone has something precious in their hands and suddenly remembers the world is full of thieves.
Lucy sees it too. Lucy sees everything, she just doesn’t always bother to comment.
She doesn’t say, “What’s wrong?” like a therapist.
She says, instead, “You all right, love?”
The word love isn’t Lucy’s usual. Which means she means it.
Charli blinks, startled, and the sorrow snaps back behind her face like a curtain drawn.
“Yeah,” she says quickly. “I’m fine.”
She is not fine.
But she is safe enough now to pretend she is, and that, frankly, is its own kind of progress.
Tahlia bumps her shoulder lightly as she passes. “Come tomorrow,” she says. “We’re getting chips. You’re not allowed to say no. You’ll just make it weird.”
The Faire girls chorus agreement. Bree points a finger at Charli like she’s casting a spell.
“She’s coming,” Bree declares. “She’s ours.”
Charli’s breath catches.
And there it is, plain as anything:
Not he, performing near women.
But she, held by women.
She looks down at her hands for a moment—at the little pinpricks, the chalk smudges, the evidence of belonging. Then she lifts her eyes back to the room, and her smile is small but unmistakably real.
“I’ll come,” she says.
And the room—without fuss, without ceremony—absorbs her answer as if it had been true for ages.
Mara taps the table once, impatient with sentiment.
“Enough talking,” she says. “More work.”
And that’s Wardrobe, isn’t it?
No speeches.
Just women doing the quiet, effective thing.
Turning “she” from a word into a place.